Anyone who claims nato expansion was a problem has spent little time in Russia. It is the easiest thing in the world to disprove but you probably had to be living there like I was.
In the early 2000s not only was Russia unconcerned about NATO, there was actually talk of them joining it! And tentative discussions about joining the EU. US soldiers and Marines trained in Russia with the Russian army in war games near Moscow. Everything culminated, of course, in the 2005 May 9th parade celebrating 60 years after WW2- with George Bush and 150 foreign dignitaries in attendance.
Meanwhile Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron were doing huge joint ventures and Russia was a land of opportunity for franchises, car sales and so on.
You can see it all in Putin's timeline(which incidentally mirros Erdogan's- the two would copy each other).
When Putin was head of the FSB and running for President with 10% of the vote, there was a series of apartments bombings that Chechnya was blamed for. Among these was the laughable situation at Ryazan where FSB agents were caught placing explosives...later claiming it was bags of sugar and a training exercise. Putin promised war on Chechnya, and launched it. Russia's constitution allows 2 terms only as president and as he was going for prime Minister with Medvedev to be his president, a convenient war in Georgia happened.
As the people started to get restless, he started to stoke nationalist fires, with his FSB buddy as the Patriarch of the Russian church. There started to be an antiwestern push. Even so the new Obama administration wanted to give Russia a "reset" to improve relations.
In 2012 Putin swapped back into the role of President which led to 2 years of protests from before when he had announced his plan, to well after he took office. This was the election that showed 146% votes on state TV and 99.5% of chechens voted for him, apparently forgetting Putin leveled their world just a few years before.
It just became easy to paint the west as the bogeyman and Russia as the centre of Christian values compared to the degenerate west. And all his Russia for Russians BS.
But it worked even with many major opposition or potential presidential candidates assassinated, arrested on trumped up charges or having to flee into exile- Putin's popularity began to fall...until Crimea...where people I knew who were against him all became like drones. Putin knows he can stir the pot anytime by starting a war. None of this is about NATO
